第32章

Again, Jehan le Montigueue, aged about seventy, deposed that, in 1449, a woman calling herself Jeanne la Pucelle came to Sermaise and feasted with the Voultons, as also did (but he does not say at the same time) the Maid's brother, Jehan du Lys.* Jehan du Lys could, at least, if he did not accept her, have warned his cousins, the Voultons, against their pretended kinswoman, the false Pucelle. But for some three years at least she came, a welcome guest, to Sermaise, matched herself against the cure at tennis, and told him that he might now say that he had played against la Pucelle de France. This news gave him the greatest pleasure.

*Op. cit. pp. 4,5, MM. de Bouteiller and de Graux do not observe the remarkable nature of this evidence, as regards the BROTHERS of the Maid; see their Preface, p. xxx.

Jehan Guillaume, aged seventy-six, had seen both the self-styled Pucelle and the real Maid's brothers at the house of the Voultons.

He did not know whether she was the true Maid or not.

It is certain, practically, that this PUCELLE, so merry at Sermaise with the brothers and cousins of the Maid, was the Jeanne des Armoises of 1436-1439. The du Lys family could not successively adopt TWO impostors as their sister! Again, the woman of circ.

1449-1452 is not a younger sister of Jeanne, who in 1429 had no sister living, though one, Catherine, whom she dearly loved, was dead.

We have now had glimpses of the impostor from 1436 to 1440, when she seems to have been publicly exposed (though the statement of the Bourgeois de Paris is certainly that of a prejudiced writer), and again we have found the impostor accepted by the paternal and maternal kin of the Maid, about 1449-1452. In 1452 the preliminary steps towards the Rehabilitation of the true Maid began, ending triumphantly in 1456. Probably the families of Voulton and du Lys now, after the trial began in 1452, found their jolly tennis-playing sister and cousin inconvenient. She reappears, NOT at Sermaise, in 1457. In that year King Rene (father of Margaret, wife of our Henry VI.) gives a remission to 'Jeanne de Sermaises.' M. Lecoy de la March, in his 'Roi Rene' (1875) made this discovery, and took 'Jeanne de Sermaises' for our old friend, 'Jeanne des Ermaises,' or 'des Armoises.' She was accused of 'having LONG called herself Jeanne la Pucelle, and deceived many persons who had seen Jeanne at the siege of Orleans.' She has lain in prison, but is let out, in February 1457, on a five years' ticket of leave, so to speak, 'provided she bear herself honestly in dress, and in other matters, as a woman should do.'

Probably, though 'at present the wife of Jean Douillet,' this Jeanne still wore male costume, hence the reference to bearing herself 'honestly in dress.' She acknowledges nothing, merely says that the charge of imposture lui a ete impose, and that she has not been actainte d'aucun autre vilain cas.* At this date Jeanne cruised about Anjou and the town of Saumur. And here, at the age of forty- five, if she was of the same age as the true Maid, we lose sight for ever of this extraordinary woman. Of course, if she was the genuine Maid, the career of La Pucelle de France ends most ignobly. The idea 'was nuts' (as the Elizabethans said) to a good anti-clerical Frenchman, M. Lesigne, who, in 1889, published 'La Fin d'une Legende.' There would be no chance of canonising a Pucelle who was twice married and lived a life of frolic.

*Lecoy de la Marche, Le Roi Rene, ii. 281-283, 1875.

A more serious and discreet scholar, M. Gaston Save, in 1893, made an effort to prove that Jeanne was not burned at Rouen.* He supposed that the Duchess of Bedford let Jeanne out of prison and bribed the two priests, Massieu and Ladvenu, who accompanied the Maid to the scaffold, to pretend that they had been with her, not with a substituted victim. This victim went with hidden face to the scaffold, le visage embronche, says Percival de Cagny, a retainer of Jeanne's 'beau duc,' d'Alencon.** The townspeople were kept apart by 800 English soldiers.*** The Madame de Luxembourg who entertained the impostor at Arlon (1436) was 'perhaps' the same as she who entertained the real Jeanne at Beaurevoir in 1430.

Unluckily THAT lady died in November 1430!

*Jehanne des Armoises, Pucelle d'Orleans, Nancy, 1893.

**Quicherat, iv. 36.

***Quicherat, ii. 14, 19.